This free Google Business Profile audit grades any published profile against 11 weighted ranking checks — claim status, categories, hours, description, photos, reviews, attributes and more — then returns a 0–100 score and a fix list ordered by how many points each change is actually worth. No signup: enter a business name to start.
Reviewed by Isabella Edwards, Technical SEO Content ManagerThe tool pulls the live public record Google holds for the profile — claim status, every category, the per-day opening hours, photo and review counts, the grouped attributes, the services list — and scores it against eleven checks weighted by how much each signal moves local visibility. The data is Google's; the 0–100 grade is ours, and the full weighting is published below so you can argue with it.
Open the business in Google Maps and copy the URL from your address bar. We read the profile's identifier straight out of it, so the audit lands on exactly that location — no guessing, no wrong branch. Typing a business name and city works too, but a link never misses.
The link carries the profile's own identifier, and we read it straight out of the URL. That means no market to choose and no ambiguity: the audit grades that one location, not a same-named business in another city or another branch of the same chain.
You get eleven checks with points earned out of points available, a fix list ordered by points left on the table, and — written from this profile's own category, services and location — a ready-to-paste description, secondary categories worth adding, and the attributes to set.
Every check in this grid runs right now, without an account. The marked features unlock when you create a free SEOmator account.
Claim status, primary and secondary categories, hours, description, photos, reviews, website, phone, attributes and services — each carrying a different weight, because they don't matter equally.
Every check shows points earned against points available. The grade is never a black box you have to take on trust — you can add the column up yourself.
The priority list sorts by what each gap is worth, not by weight. A fully-earned 15-point check never outranks a 10-point one you're losing outright.
The record is public, so you can audit a competitor's profile exactly as easily as your own — and see which categories and attributes they've claimed that you haven't.
A ready-to-paste description in the language the profile already trades in, the secondary categories that plausibly fit, and the attributes worth setting — written from this profile's own category, city and service list, so the two checks businesses most often leave empty come back answered rather than only flagged.
The recurring phrases across a profile's reviews, with counts — the closest public read on what a business is actually known for, rather than what it says about itself.
Watch the grade move as you fill the profile in, instead of keeping your own spreadsheet of what you changed and when.
Get told when hours, categories or the website link change — including edits you didn't make, which is how most profile hijacks are noticed.
Audit a whole multi-location estate in one pass, with the weakest profiles surfaced first instead of checked one name at a time.
Create a free SEOmator account to track profile scores over time, get alerted to unexpected edits, and audit every location at once.
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Reviewed byIsabella Edwards · Technical SEO Content ManagerLocal audits usually arrive as a 40-point checklist where every line looks equally urgent, which is how businesses end up adding a price level while their secondary categories sit empty. I wanted the opposite: eleven checks, weighted, with the fix list sorted by what you actually get back. The honest limitation is that this grades completeness, not ranking. Google's local results lean heavily on proximity to the searcher and on prominence earned off-profile — links, citations, coverage — and this tool can see neither. A 100 here means nothing is missing from the profile; it does not mean you will win the map pack against a competitor two blocks closer. Fix the profile because it is the part you control, then use a local rank check to find out where you actually stand.
Isabella Edwards · Technical SEO Content ManagerAcross the 885 US business profiles we sampled in July 2026, 44.3% had no secondary categories at all. It's the most common gap we measure, it costs nothing to fix, and it's the only change that widens which searches you're eligible for. For the right list, audit two competitors already ranking above you: their categories are public, which makes them the closest thing to a published answer key for your category in your city.
If the claim check fails, stop reading the rest. Until the profile is claimed, anyone can suggest edits to your hours and phone number, you cannot reply to reviews, and every other fix on the list can be quietly reverted by a stranger. In our July 2026 sample, 21.5% of profiles were still unclaimed.
One in five profiles we sampled (20.3%) had no hours at all. Fix that first. Then, in your own dashboard, mark your closed days as closed rather than leaving them blank: Google reads a blank day as "hours unknown" and drops the profile out of "open now" filtering, while a day marked closed is a published fact. From the outside those two look identical, so this audit can't tell them apart — but Google can.
Google allows 750, but the profile truncates at roughly 250 behind a "more" link that most people never press. Put what you do and where you do it in front of the fold and treat the remaining 500 as overflow, not as space that needs filling.
The recurring phrases the audit surfaces are what customers actually say about the business, with counts. If "long lines" appears twenty times, that belongs in your operations review, not in a description that calls the place relaxed.
Profile edits go through review and can take a day or more to appear in the public record this tool reads. Re-running the audit ten minutes after saving shows you the old data and reads as a bug in the tool rather than latency at Google.
A Google Business Profile is the only part of your local presence that Google hosts for you. That cuts both ways. You don't have to build it, host it or keep it fast — but you also can't inspect it the way you'd inspect your own site, and most of the fields that decide how it performs are invisible unless you go looking.
An audit is that look. It reads the public record Google holds for a listing and asks a narrow question of each field: is this filled in, and is it filled in well enough to be useful?
Here's the part most local audit tools leave out. Profile completeness is one of three things driving local results, and it's the smallest of the three.
The other two are relevance — does this business match what was typed — and prominence, which is roughly how well known the business is across the rest of the web: links, mentions in local press, citations on directories, the volume and quality of reviews. Google also weighs proximity, the physical distance between the searcher and the business, and proximity often overwhelms everything else. A profile scoring 100 can sit below a half-finished competitor for someone standing outside that competitor's door.
So read a profile score as a floor, not a forecast. It tells you nothing is missing from the part you fully control. It doesn't promise a position, and any tool that says otherwise is selling something.
For a sense of where the floor usually sits: we graded 885 US business profiles on this rubric in July 2026, across fifteen categories in Austin, Columbus and Phoenix. The median score was 82 out of 100. About a fifth (21.0%) scored under 50, a quarter (25.6%) landed between 50 and 79, and 53.3% cleared 80. Most profiles are not disasters — they're two or three specific fields short.
If a profile isn't claimed, nothing else on the audit is worth acting on yet.
Google creates listings whether or not anyone asks. If enough signals point at a business existing at an address — a website, a phone number, user submissions, data licensed from elsewhere — a profile can appear on its own. That listing is live, searchable, and editable by the public.
Unclaimed means three concrete things:
That's why claiming carries the joint-heaviest weight in our rubric. It isn't a completeness item. It's the difference between a profile you manage and a profile that happens to be about you.
Verification usually runs by postcard, phone or video, and video verification has become the common path for service-area businesses. Budget a week or two, and start it before you plan any other work — every fix below is reversible by a stranger until it's done.
If you travel to customers rather than receiving them, hide the street address and set service areas instead. A plumber listing a home address gets pinned to a residential street, which distorts the proximity signal and can trigger a suspension. The profile still ranks; it just ranks around the areas you declare rather than a single point.
The primary category is the most consequential field on the entire profile, and it's the one people spend the least time on.
It's not a label or a description. It's closer to a filter: Google uses it to decide which searches this profile is even considered for. Get it wrong and no amount of photography, review volume or description writing puts you in front of the right query, because you were excluded before ranking started.
Two failure patterns account for most of the damage.
Picking the broadest category you qualify for. A practice that does implants, whitening and general checkups files itself under "Dentist" because all three fit. But someone searching for implants sees profiles categorised "Dental implants provider" first, and a general "Dentist" competes at a disadvantage for a query it could have owned. Specific beats defensible.
Leaving secondary categories empty. This is the most common gap we grade, and it's free to fix. When we graded 885 US business profiles across fifteen categories and three cities in July 2026, 44.3% had no secondary categories at all — the single most widespread failure in the sample, ahead of missing descriptions (34.0%) and missing websites (20.7%). Secondary categories widen eligibility without touching the primary one, and a business with genuine range — a café that also does catering, a law firm with a distinct immigration practice — is leaving whole query sets unclaimed by not declaring them.
The limit is judgement, not just policy. Every secondary category you add should describe something a customer could actually buy from you today. Categories for services you don't offer are a policy violation Google enforces with suspensions, and a suspended profile ranks nowhere at all. Three genuine secondary categories beat ten aspirational ones by a wide margin.
If you want a shortcut to the right list, audit two competitors already ranking above you. Their categories are public, and they're the closest thing to a published answer key for your category in your city.
Opening hours look like the most boring field on the profile. They're also the one that most often fails silently.
Google treats an empty day and a day marked closed as two different statements. Marked closed means "this business does not open on Sunday" — a fact, published. Empty means "hours unknown", and unknown hours pull the profile out of the "open now" filter that a large share of local searches apply, sometimes without the searcher realising they applied it.
So a business that's genuinely shut on Sundays and leaves Sunday blank isn't being neutral. It's telling Google it doesn't know its own schedule, and paying for that on the other six days too.
There's an honest caveat here, and it's ours rather than yours. That distinction is real inside your Google dashboard, but it does not survive into the public record this audit reads — a closed day and an unset day both come back empty. So the audit can tell you a profile has no hours at all, which is the failure that matters most and which we found on 20.3% of the 885 US profiles we sampled in July 2026. It cannot tell you whether your quiet Sunday is marked closed or left blank. Check that one in your own dashboard.
Two extras worth the ten minutes:
Special hours for public holidays are a separate field, and it's the one that generates angry reviews when it's neglected. A profile showing "open now" on a day the door is locked converts a routine closure into a one-star review about a wasted trip.
If you run split hours — lunch service and dinner service, morning and evening clinics — enter them as two intervals on the same day rather than one long block. The audit reads intervals, and so does the "open now" filter.
Google allows 750 characters. The profile shows roughly the first 250 before collapsing the rest behind a "more" link that most people never press.
That's the whole strategy. Everything load-bearing goes in front of the fold: what you do, where you do it, and what makes someone choose you over the next result. The remaining 500 characters are overflow — useful, indexed, and read by a minority.
What doesn't belong anywhere in it: your own reviews, promotional claims about being the best or the leading anything, prices that will drift, and links. Google's guidelines exclude promotional content and URLs from the description, and descriptions get rejected for it.
What works is plain and specific. Name the services, name the neighbourhoods or towns you actually cover, and say what's different in the words a customer would use rather than the words your industry uses.
Our rubric gives full credit at 250 characters rather than 750, because 750 is a ceiling and treating it as a target produces padding. A tight 300-character description that says something outperforms a 740-character one that repeats the category name six times.
These are different fields with the same underlying job: they tell a stranger whether the business is currently operating and worth the trip.
Photos. Under ten, a profile reads as abandoned regardless of how complete the text fields are. The ordering matters more than the total. Exterior shots come first, because their real job is helping someone recognise the door from the pavement while holding a phone — that's a navigation problem, not a marketing one. Interior next, so people know what they're walking into. Products, team and work-in-progress after that.
Photos also arrive from customers, and you don't control those. What you control is having enough of your own that the customer photos aren't the entire impression.
Reviews. Below about ten, the star rating is noise. One bad experience moves a 5.0 to a 4.0 and there's nothing to absorb it, which makes the number both fragile and uninformative. Past ten it starts behaving like a rating.
The part businesses skip is replies. A reply isn't for the person who complained — that relationship is usually already decided. It's for the next twenty people who read the thread while choosing, and an unanswered complaint reads very differently from one with a straight, non-defensive answer under it.
Never buy reviews, and don't run incentives that only reward positive ones. Google detects review manipulation and the penalty lands on the profile, not the vendor who sold them.
The audit surfaces recurring phrases from a profile's reviews with counts attached. It's the closest public read on what a business is known for, as opposed to what it says about itself.
Use it before you write anything. If "long lines" appears twenty times, that's an operations finding, and no description calling the place relaxed will survive contact with it. If a product you barely mention dominates the topics, your description is arguing for the wrong thing.
Attributes are the checkboxes: wheelchair accessible entrance, outdoor seating, delivery, free wi-fi, women-owned, accepts reservations, LGBTQ+ friendly.
They look cosmetic. They aren't, because Google turns them into filters. When a searcher narrows to wheelchair-accessible restaurants, that filter is built from this field — and a restaurant that is fully accessible but never ticked the box is excluded from the results. Not ranked lower. Excluded.
The asymmetry is what makes this worth ten minutes: an unset attribute costs you visibility whether or not it's true of you, and setting it costs nothing.
Some attributes are owner-set and some are derived from customer feedback, so you won't control all of them. Set the ones you can, and check them once a year — Google adds new attribute types regularly, and a profile that was complete in 2024 has gaps it never had to fill then.
The rubric is published because a score you can't interrogate isn't much use.
| Check | Weight | Full credit at |
|---|---|---|
| Profile claimed | 15 | claimed and verified |
| Primary category | 15 | any primary category set |
| Secondary categories | 10 | 3 categories |
| Opening hours | 10 | 5 days (see below) |
| Business description | 10 | 250 characters |
| Photos | 10 | 10 photos |
| Reviews | 10 | 10 reviews |
| Website link | 8 | any website linked |
| Phone number | 5 | any phone listed |
| Attributes | 5 | 5 attributes |
| Services or menu | 2 | at least one listed |
Weights follow ranking impact rather than effort or field count. That's why claiming and the primary category carry three times what services carries — they gate eligibility, while a services list refines an eligibility you already have.
Quantity checks award partial credit against the target in the third column. Photos, reviews, categories and attributes scale linearly, so five photos earns half the photo points.
Hours are the exception, and the reason is worth stating. Google's public record returns nothing for a day whether the business is closed that day or has simply never set it — from the outside the two are identical. A seven-day target would therefore mark down every correctly configured Monday-to-Friday business for not opening at weekends. When we graded 885 US profiles in July 2026 the distribution came out bimodal: 20.3% had no hours at all, 78.6% had four days or more, and almost nothing sat in between. So full credit lands at five days, inside that gap, which separates "never filled hours in" from "closed at weekends" without accusing the second of being the first.
Binary checks — claimed, website, phone — are all or nothing, because there's no such thing as a partially listed phone number.
The bands are deliberately wide. Below 50 is incomplete, 50 to 79 needs work, 80 and above is a strong profile. A 79 and an 81 are the same profile with a rounding difference, and treating either as a threshold would be false precision.
The fix list sorts by points still available rather than by weight, which is a small distinction that changes the output. A profile with a perfect 15-point category setup and zero of 10 photo points sees photos first, because that's where the recoverable points are.
Work the priority list top down, and resist the urge to do the easy items first — they're at the bottom for a reason.
Claim first if that check failed. Everything else is provisional until it's done.
Then categories, because they're the only fix that changes which searches you're eligible for at all. Everything below competes for queries you're already in.
Hours, description and attributes are one sitting. None takes long, all three are entirely under your control, and together they're 25 points.
Photos and reviews are ongoing rather than a task. Add photos in small batches over months instead of thirty in one afternoon; ask recent customers rather than running a campaign; reply to everything.
Then leave it alone for a while. Profile edits go through Google's review and can take a day or more to reach the public record, so re-auditing an hour after saving shows you stale data and looks like a bug. Monthly is a sensible cadence for a single location, and after any real change — new service line, category change, a site migration that moves the linked URL.
One last thing worth doing while you're here. The website field is a free path from one of Google's highest-trust surfaces to your own site, and most businesses point it at their homepage by reflex. Point it at the page that answers what the searcher wanted — the location page, the service page, the booking form. If that page is slow, the click you just earned is at risk, so it's worth a speed test and a mobile check while the profile work is fresh.
You know the profile isn't finished but not which gap costs you most. The score turns "it needs work" into a ranked list where the top item is worth ten points and the bottom one is worth two.
Audit a prospect's profile and their two closest competitors before the pitch. Walking in with the specific categories and attributes they're missing is a different conversation from offering a local SEO retainer.
Franchise and chain profiles drift — a manager changes hours, a location loses its website link. Score them one by one to find which locations have quietly fallen behind the template.
A missing primary category and a missing price level are both empty fields, but only one decides which searches you're eligible for. The weighting says so instead of pretending they're equal.
Every weight and threshold is written out on this page. You can disagree with our numbers — which is more than most local audit tools let you do.
The full score, all eleven checks and the complete fix list appear on the page. We don't hold a grade back for an email address.
Proximity and off-profile prominence drive local rankings and this audit measures neither. That's stated plainly here rather than buried once you've already paid.
The data is Google's public record, so auditing the business outranking you needs no access, no permission and no extra step.
One of 39 free SEO tools, from a complete site audit to a rank checker and a mobile-friendly test — local search is overwhelmingly mobile.
A Google Business Profile audit is a structured review of everything Google publicly holds about a business listing — whether it's claimed, which categories it's filed under, whether hours are set, how complete the description is, how many photos and reviews it carries, which attributes and services are declared. The point is to find the gaps that make the profile eligible for fewer searches than it should be, and most profiles have them: across the 885 US profiles we sampled in July 2026, the median score on this rubric was 82 out of 100, but 44.3% had no secondary categories and 21.5% were not claimed at all. This tool runs eleven weighted checks, so the output is a prioritized fix list rather than an undifferentiated inventory.
Because name lookup fails quietly, which is the worst way to fail. Google matches names literally: "Torchys Tacos" returns nothing where "Torchy's Tacos" returns six Austin branches — one apostrophe. Worse, a chain name returns one arbitrary location and the audit would score it confidently, so you'd read a real 84/100 for a profile that isn't yours. A link carries the profile's own identifier, so there is exactly one answer and it's the right one. Open the business in Google Maps, copy the URL from your address bar, paste it. A raw CID or place_id works too if you have one.
Eleven checks, weighted by how much each signal moves local visibility: claimed status 15 points, primary category 15, secondary categories 10, opening hours 10, description 10, photos 10, reviews 10, website link 8, phone 5, attributes 5, and services or menu 2. Quantity checks award partial credit against a stated target — photos and reviews target ten, secondary categories target three, description targets 250 characters, and hours target five days rather than seven, because Google's public record can't distinguish a closed day from an unset one and a Monday-to-Friday business shouldn't be marked down for it. Binary checks (claimed, website, phone) are all-or-nothing. The score is SEOmator's rubric, not a number Google publishes.
Claim and verify it, set a specific primary category plus up to three genuine secondary ones, set hours for every day you trade, write at least 250 characters of description, get past ten photos and ten reviews, link a website and a phone number, populate the attributes that apply to you, and list your services or menu. That earns 100 on this rubric — which just over half the profiles we sampled in July 2026 were already within reach of, at 53.3% scoring 80 or above. Worth saying plainly: 100 means nothing is missing, not that you'll rank first. Proximity to the searcher and off-profile prominence drive the local pack, and neither is something a profile audit can measure.
Google My Business was renamed Google Business Profile in November 2021, and the standalone management app was retired in 2024 — profiles are now managed directly from Google Search and Maps. "GMB" persists in the industry because it's shorter and because a decade of documentation used it, so "GMB audit" and "Google Business Profile audit" mean the same thing. This tool uses the current name; the data it reads is the same public record either way.
No. Everything this audit reads is the public record Google shows any searcher, so you can grade a competitor's profile exactly as you'd grade your own, without access or permission. That's the tool's most useful mode: run the two businesses currently outranking you and compare their categories and attributes against yours. What you cannot do without ownership is act on the findings — editing hours, adding categories or replying to reviews all require a claimed profile.
One primary category, chosen as specifically as the list allows, plus up to about three secondary ones that describe services you genuinely provide. The primary category is the strongest single signal for which searches the profile is eligible for, so it should be the most precise fit rather than the broadest label you qualify for. Secondary categories widen that eligibility, but they are also the most common route to a suspension: adding categories for services you don't actually offer is a policy violation Google enforces, and a suspended profile ranks nowhere at all.
No, and that's a deliberate boundary rather than a missing feature. Local pack results are personalized by the searcher's distance from the business, so there is no single position to report — the same profile is first from one street and absent from another two miles away. This tool measures profile completeness, which is the part you fully control. To see actual positions, pair it with a [rank check](/google-serp-rank-checker), and read any single local position as one point on a map rather than a ranking.
Completeness is the entry fee, not the strategy. Once the profile scores well, the work becomes recurring: reply to every review, because replies are read by everyone who arrives later; keep hours accurate around holidays, since a wrong "open now" is worse than no hours; add photos periodically rather than in one batch at setup; and keep the services list current as the offering changes. The profile is closer to a channel you maintain than a form you complete.
Yes — no account, no credit card, no trial that expires. Each audit is a live lookup against Google's current record, so it costs us money per run; the tool is rate-limited per visitor to keep it that way rather than gated behind a sign-up. A free SEOmator account adds score history, alerts when a profile changes unexpectedly, and multi-location auditing, but nothing on this page is held back behind it.
Monthly is enough for a stable single-location business, and after any change worth making — a new service line, a category change, a website migration that moves the linked URL. Two timing notes: profile edits go through Google's review and can take a day or more to show up in the public record this tool reads, so re-auditing within the hour shows stale data; and multi-location estates drift faster than single profiles, because every location manager is a potential editor.
Deeper reading from the SEOmator blog on what this tool measures.
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